Supreme Commander (5 page)

The War Department position differed radically. WPD had classified as subsidiary theaters not only the Far East but also the Iberian Peninsula, the Scandinavian Peninsula, Africa, and the Middle East. The American premise, which was Marshall’s and from which he never wavered, was that the plains of northwestern Europe constituted the main theater, where “we must come to grips with the enemy ground forces.”
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It soon became apparent that the difficulty was that no attack on the main theater could be launched in 1942, so if the President’s dictum was to be met it would have to be elsewhere.

Much of the next two years would be taken up with arguments about Marshall’s conception of the quickest and surest way of defeating Germany. During ARCADIA, however, the Americans did not push. They
agreed to study GYMNAST, the North African operation, and to begin implementing MAGNET, which sent American troops to Northern Ireland, allowing the British to release troops in the home islands for the Middle East.

At ARCADIA, Marshall was more concerned with organization than with strategy. Where to fight the war could be worked out later, but how to fight it had to be settled immediately. The
sine qua non
of Allied success, Marshall felt, was the adoption of the concept of unity of command.

This concept differed radically from the British practice. In their most active theater, the Middle East, as elsewhere, the British worked with a committed system. The senior army, air, and naval officers formed a group called the Commanders in Chief and directed the war in that theater, subject to close supervision from London. The system had the advantage of avoiding any instance in which a general gave an order to an admiral, or vice versa, while it had the inherent disadvantage of most committees trying to operate in a crisis situation.

Following the first ARCADIA meeting, Eisenhower wrote a memorandum for Marshall on the subject of unity of command. He did not intend to influence Marshall’s thinking, but rather to supply him with arguments, since the Chief was going to make his bid for agreement in principle at the next day’s meeting. Eisenhower began by pointing out that in the Southwest Pacific there were several separate forces operating, each independent of all the others—the American Air Force, the American Asiatic Fleet, the Australian Forces (which consisted of three separate arms), the British Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the Dutch land, sea, and air forces. It was obvious, Eisenhower said, that “the strength of the allied defenses in the entire theater would be greatly increased through single, intelligent command.” He realized that with the number of independent national interests involved, as well as the separate organizations represented, “real unity of command cannot be achieved suddenly,” but did feel that it could be achieved in small localities such as Singapore, where “the paramount interest and the vast majority of the forces concerned are British.” He pointed out that “unification of British forces could be accomplished by a single order from the head of the government,” while the forces of the other powers in the area could be directed to report to the British supreme commander for orders.

Eisenhower was trying to slip in the principle through the back door by getting the British to adopt it in their current hot spot (in return
for dropping their committee system, the British would get command of the small American forces in the area). Hopefully, then, the British would not object when the principle was applied elsewhere, over a broader area.

Marshall, however, felt there was no hope of success in Singapore—the old salts in the Admiralty would never allow a British general to direct their fight, and the British Army felt the same way about the Royal Navy. In any case Marshall was after bigger game, and he therefore rejected Eisenhower’s recommendation.
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Instead, at the Christmas afternoon meeting, which Eisenhower attended, Marshall used the opportunity presented by a discussion on the question of reinforcements for MacArthur to broach the larger issue. He said it was too early to make a decision on aid for the Philippines and in any case it was not an appropriate topic for the Chiefs of Staff. If they were to become involved in the details on what went to each local commander it would take all their time. By the same token no local commander could see the situation whole and each would be demanding everything he could think of for his particular locality. In a world-wide war this was intolerable. The Allies needed someone in between the Chiefs and the local commanders—they needed, in short, a supreme theater commander.

The most important consideration before the ARCADIA conference, Marshall maintained, was unity of command. “I am convinced,” he said, “that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships. We cannot manage by cooperation. Human frailties are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service. If we can make a plan for unified command now, it will solve nine-tenths of our troubles.” Marshall realized there were objections but felt they were “much less than the hazards that must be faced” by the Allies if they failed to achieve unity of command. He wanted one man, operating under instructions from a combined body in Washington, to direct operations in each theater. “We had to come to this in the First World War,” he concluded, “but it was not until 1918 that it was accomplished, and much valuable time, blood and treasure had been needlessly sacrificed.”
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Raising the specter of World War I failed to move the British. They had not expected Marshall’s proposal and were unwilling to discuss it until they had an opportunity to sound out the Prime Minister. Realizing that he had made a tactical blunder by not preparing the ground, Marshall closed the meeting, cornered Eisenhower, and told him to
draft immediately a letter of instruction for the prospective supreme commander of the Pacific area, the only theater in which combined (multinational) forces were then operating. By showing the British something concrete, Marshall hoped to convince them that “no real risk would be involved to the interests of any of the Associated Powers, while on the other hand great profits should result.”

Eisenhower, made cautious by Marshall, placed drastic limits on the supreme commander. In his draft he said that the commander had no authority to move ground forces from one territory to another within the theater and could move only those air forces that the governments concerned chose to put at his disposal. He had no power to relieve national commanders or their subordinates, to interfere in the tactical organization and disposition of their forces, to commandeer their supplies, or to control their communications with their respective governments. These limitations, as severe as those under which Marshal Foch operated in 1918, were drastic. Eisenhower and Marshall defended them on the grounds that they represented the best that could be accomplished. Marshall declared, “If the supreme commander ended up with no more authority than to tell Washington what he wanted, such a situation was better than nothing, and an improvement over the present situation.” The command would be called ABDA—Australian, British, Dutch, American.
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Marshall showed Eisenhower’s draft to the President, who approved. To sweeten the pill for the British, Marshall proposed that General Sir Archibald Wavell, a British ground commander, become Supreme Commander, ABDA. The United States Navy objected to Wavell, but Marshall won them over. He then presented the proposal to the next ARCADIA meeting. The British Navy “kicked like bay steers,” but after some backing and hedging, Marshall received their assent. He had achieved his main goal for ARCADIA—agreement on unity of command.
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A long discussion over who should give directives to Wavell followed; eventually, following the British lead, the Chiefs agreed that Wavell should report to and receive his directives from a committee—the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS). It would be composed of the Chiefs of Staff of the two nations, and would sit permanently in Washington, where the British Chiefs of Staff (BCOS) would be represented by a permanent Joint Staff Mission, headed by Field Marshall Sir John Dill, former Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In international conferences—such as ARCADIA—the BCOS members would act for themselves.
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To
create a parallel organization to BCOS, the Americans created the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), composed of Marshall, General Henry H. Arnold of the Army Air Forces, the Commander in Chief, U. S. Fleet, and soon to be Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King, and—somewhat later—Roosevelt’s personal Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy. The JCS would be responsible for the higher direction of the American war effort.
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This meant, in practice, increased work for WPD, for Marshall was the dominant personality on the JCS. He would now be involved daily in discussions of world-wide strategy, and it was to WPD that he looked for help. The work load was already great enough; as Eisenhower told a friend who was coming to Washington to join the War Department, “Just to give you an inkling as to the kind of mad house you are getting into, it is now eight o’clock New Year’s Eve. I have a couple hours’ work ahead of me, and tomorrow will be no different from today. I have been here about three weeks and this noon I had my first luncheon outside of the office.” Usually he ate a hot dog at his desk. He lived with his brother Milton, a government employee who had a home in Falls Church, Virginia, and not once did he see the house in daylight. He would arrive after dark, have a drink and dinner, play with Milton’s children for a few minutes, and fall into bed. In the morning he left before daylight.
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Despite the daily strain and tension under which he worked, Eisenhower bore up well, presenting the appearance of a faceless, tireless staff officer. The mask came off, briefly, when on March 10 his seventy-nine-year-old father died. Eisenhower confessed that he felt terrible. “I should like so much to be with my Mother these few days.” He could not, for “we’re at war! And war is not soft—it has no time to indulge even the deepest and most sacred emotions.” On March 11 his father was buried. For thirty minutes Eisenhower closed his office door and shut off all business, “to have that much time, by myself, to think of him.” Eisenhower thought of his five brothers, of his mother, of his father’s reputation in Abilene, of how proud he was to be his father’s son. “He was a just man,” Eisenhower said, “well liked, well educated, a thinker. He was undemonstrative, quiet, modest, and of exemplary habits.… He was an uncomplaining person in the face of adversity, and such plaudits as were accorded him did not inflate his ego.” Finally, the only regret: “It was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him.”

At 7:30
P.M
. Eisenhower noted simply, “I love my Dad,” closed his office, and went home. “I haven’t the heart to go on tonight.”
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On February 16 Gerow assumed a field command and Eisenhower took charge of WPD. At the time Marshall was in the midst of a reorganization of the War Department. For Eisenhower, the result was increased responsibility. After noting in his desk pad that “The Joint and Combined staff work is terrible! Takes an unconscionable amount of time,” he declared. “We are faced with a big reorganization of W.D. We need it! The [General Staff] is all to be cut down, except W.P.D.—which now has all the Joint and Combined work, all plans and all operations so far as active theaters are concerned!” Continuing to pour out his frustrations, he added, “Fox Conner was right about allies. He could well have included the Navy!”
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The key feature of the reorganization as a whole (completed on March 23) was the unequivocal grant of broad power over the entire Army to the Chief of Staff. Inevitably in practice this resulted in placing power in the hands of Eisenhower’s division, renamed the Operations Division (OPD), since it was to that agency that Marshall turned for strategic plans and directives and the transmission of orders to theaters.
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Although Eisenhower headed OPD, although OPD was Marshall’s command post, and although Marshall had enormous powers, neither Eisenhower nor Marshall nor anyone else was, at any time, solely responsible for the strategic direction of the war. The conflict was too vast, the commitment of men and material too great for anyone to have the situation as a whole complete in his mind. It took dozens of men to work out the details of allocation of resources, industrial priorities, shipping space, and supply problems, to plan and execute operations involving hundreds of thousands of men, ships, and planes. All big offensives needed a lead time of from three to six months to prepare. In the first two years of American participation, shortages of everything compounded the problem. “It’s a back breaking job to get a single battle order out,” Eisenhower noted, “and then it can’t be executed for from 3–4 months!!!”
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Even had there been someone in the War Department trying to run the entire show himself, he would have met constant frustration. Marshall, Eisenhower, and OPD were not working in a vacuum; their solutions often did not agree with those of the U. S. Navy or the President and seldom were they in complete accord with the British. Eisenhower put it succinctly: “In a war such as this, where high command invariably involves a Pres., a Prime Minister, 6 Chiefs of Staff and a horde of
lesser ‘planners’ there has got to be a lot of patience—no one person can be a Napoleon or a Caesar!” Still, it was frustrating. “My God,” he declared, “how I hate to work by any method that forces me to depend on anyone else.”
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All of which does not mean that OPD played a minimal role in the war. Marshall’s authority over the United States Army was complete, and he exercised it mainly through OPD. His voice carried great weight with the President, the Prime Minister, and on the CCS, and he relied upon OPD for background material and detailed planning. Marshall set the goals, while OPD prepared the studies that showed how they could be accomplished.